College Football Parity: How the College Football Playoff Changed the Game
COLLEGE FOOTBALL PARITY: HOW THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF CHANGED THE GAME – Take a look at the top 10 teams in the College Football Playoff, and you’ll see some familiar names in the mix. However, there’s a few more that are far less associated with being a blue blood.
Indiana at No. 5 overall. SMU with an inside track at a top-four seed. BYU still undefeated and in the top 10.
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Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, Florida State is somehow 1-9 and has locked up last place in the ACC. That’s got nothing to do with the College Football Playoff, of course, but everyone loves a gratuitous shot at the Seminoles. And it does have something to do with College Football Parity. The rules of the game have changed, and now it’s possible for teams to win that weren’t traditional powers.
Here’s a look at how the playoff has truly changed the game.
Opening Things Up
When the NCAA Tournament expanded to 68 teams, we saw something we never got when it was 64 teams: a 16 seed beating a 1. In 25 years as a 64 or 65-team field, a 16 never beat a 1 on the men’s side. It happened once on the women’s side, and it required Stanford to have two of its top three scorers tear an ACL in between Selection Monday and their first round game.
But after expanding to 68, UMBC and Fairleigh Dickinson both broke through, beating Virginia and Purdue. The next year, the Cavaliers won the title and the Boilermakers played for it, so it wasn’t like either was overseeded. They just faced the wrong opponent. But why did that matter?
Two reasons. First, the teams that were now 16s would have been 15s before. The top seeds were facing better teams with the two worst teams gone before round 1. Second, expanding the tournament gave more schools a chance. And when you give more schools a chance, players realize they don’t have to chase the blue bloods.
Related: Is Indiana Football for Real Under Curt Cignetti?
In college football, the expansion from four to 12 appears to have had a similar effect. Indiana is 10-0, and it’s anything but a blue blood. The Hoosiers have never won 10 games in football before in one season. But Curt Cignetti was able to bring his system and his best talent to Bloomington, and it’s working. And the reason he could do that is because Indiana had a guaranteed path to the playoff. Win every game, and the Hoosiers would go to the playoff. Simple. Lose one, and there was still a good chance.
The Hoosiers now face a situation at Ohio State where they’re almost playing with house money. If they win this game in Columbus, they will be in the playoff as long as they squash Purdue. A loss in the Big Ten title game to Oregon or Penn State wouldn’t be enough to knock the Hoosiers from the top 12.
The same holds at Boise State, BYU or even Washington State. Any of these schools can realistically dream about the playoff now. It’s no longer the SEC’s exclusive domain.
Going Window Shopping
Yes, the SMU jokes essentially write themselves. The Mustangs got the death penalty for paying players in 1987, and the school then bought its way into the ACC by choosing to take no television money for almost a decade. Lost in that was that the Mustangs already had a pretty solid team, and the school in Dallas now has the financial muscle to bring in talent and no restrictions on what it can buy.
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SMU will pay for talent like it did in the 1980s, and it has the right coach to make sure that it’s buying when it makes sense. This is why the Mustangs were well-positioned to compete in the ACC: they had already built the foundation. It’s also why a program like James Madison has had continued success for years: the Dukes spent like they were an FBS team before ever becoming one. If you act like you’re a top team in this system, you can become one.
Automatic Bids
Even before the expansion to 68 teams, college basketball still saw its share of upsets happen. And that’s because every school had a realistic path to a national title. Realistic might be stretching it, but every school had a path to the title. If you went undefeated, you were the national champ, no questions asked.
Last year, Florida State did go undefeated and got left out for a one-loss Alabama. It should have been a clear-cut decision. But politics and TV got in the way and Alabama got in over FSU. Granted, the Seminoles have been a dumpster fire ever since, but they should have been in the playoff. The message was clear: if you want to play in the big time, you HAVE to be in the SEC.
Not anymore. Now any school can realistically dream. Army, for example, is one Boise State loss away from being in the driver’s seat for the playoff. That’s something out of the 1940s. And that’s the new era that we live in. For all of college football’s flaws with NIL — and there are many — that’s a pretty cool thing.
